Amish Farmland Tour

We had a nice time touring the PA Dutch countryside, it was very beautiful with all the farms very green and most of the homes have these wonderful red roofs. One thing you will notice in our blog is there are no pictures of the Amish people. It is against their beliefs to have their pictures taken, they believe it to be vain . In order to honor their beliefs we were asked not to take photos of the Amish. The Amish live a very simple life, no phones, TV, electricity. All though they are permitted to use those items they just cannot have them in their home. Cars are not allowed all though they can ride in one. The Amish use a gas powered washing machine and propane refrigerator...Very interesting people.

We also went to the Ephrata Cloister the reconstructed buildings are from 1720, when a German man by the name of Conrad Beissel came to PA to find religious freedom. By 1750 there were 80 brothers and sisters. This group lived a very simple and celibate life, Beissel felt that God would be coming soon and he and his followers wanted to be ready they believed God would come in the middle of the night, so at 12am they all went into the church and prayed and until 2 am before going back to bed again. The community is most known for its charity helping new settlers to build houses, caring for the elderly. Beissel died in 1768 and the last member of the German Seventh-day Baptist Church died in 1813. I could go on and on as I found this to be very interesting. By the way, during the winter of 1777-1778 the Cloister was the site of the Revolutionary War Military Hospital.

We also toured the oldest pretzel bakery in north America . In 1861, Julius Strugis opened America's first pretzel bakery. Did you know that.... the pretzel, the world's oldest snack food, dates back to as early as 610AD at a monastery in Southern France or Northern Italy where monks used scraps of dough and formed them into strips to represent a child's arms folded in prayer. The three holes represented the Christian Trinity.